Rainbow salad

With two young girls, our lives are very colorful to say the least. It’s hard to imagine life without them. My twins are very colorful little people and big artists, always creating something…very colorful of course! To play on their love of color, I like to talk with them about why it important for us to eat lots of colorful foods, and play the “rainbow plate” game (see past post) or when we go to the grocery store or market to pick out the most colorful fruit and veggies they can find. It’s a fun way to teach them about healthy food and for them to try new versions of things, something which is not always easy with young kids.

I love coming back from the store this time of year and throwing to together what ever I have and making a “rainbow salad”, sorry not always good at coming up with names for my salad bowls but they really are rainbow salads! One tip I’ll pass on which is nothing new but that I have found to be incredibly helpful is to pre-chop some items ahead of time. Often we do this on Sunday night so we have a mini-salad bar ready to go in the fridge Monday morning. It’s also a great way for my husband and I to spend time together in the kitchen. He doesn’t do a lot of cooking but boy is he an amazing chopper. I seriously can count the number of times I have chopped an onion or minced garlic on one hand since we have been married. Talk about how lucky I am! Doing this pre-prep makes things less overwhelming for me when we come home at the bewitching hours from school and work and people are hungry and sometimes grumpy. Not having to chop a big thing of cabbage or dice some red peppers or cook brown rice is so nice and makes dinner really easy to throw together. Speaking of brown rice, you can also throw in a scoop of cooked brown rice to your salad bowls. Though not pictured here, we often to do this if we need a little more starch in our meal. There are really so many possibilities for such “rainbow salads”. I’ll be posting more!

Rainbow SaladYield: 4 servings

With some pre-chopping this salad is super quick to throw together. You can add a little lemon juice and olive oil as a dressing or simply just use the salsa as dressing (my personal favorite thing to do!).